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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



HI 19 IB 






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FROM THE RIGHT/ REV- 
EREND PHILLIPS ^BROOKS 
DOCTOR OF DIVINITY AND 
BISHOP OF MASSACHUSETTS 



BOSTON / 

J. G. CUPPLES COMPANY 
THE BACK BAY BOOK STORE 

250 BOYLSTON STREET 



Y 




Copyright, 1892, 
By J. G. Cupples Company. 



A II rights reser7jed. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE . 

Education . . , . . i 



The State 7 

War 13 

The Church . , .27 

Scepticism 49 

Life . 55 




Vacation . 

j|HE true future does not re- 
peat but enlarges the pres- 
ent. And every present 
which accepts this law ac- 
cepts with it its appointed work, to 
gather the stones and the timbers for 
the temples which the future is to 
build. It makes this the principle on 
which it proceeds in training a new 
generation. It disciplines the child 
with reverence, as destined to a com- 
pleter life than the parent. It tran- 
scends selfishness, and prejudice, and 
jealousy, and, with a large and lov- 
ing hope, a complete faith in human 
progress, it imagines no perfection for 
CO 



2 ITnepiration anfc Grutb* 

itself except this relative one of perfectly 
filling its place in the gradual perfection 
of the whole. 



You will see how this truth, which 
makes the teacher in this great world- 
school always recognize that the scholar 
is to have larger work than his to do, 
will make all education of necessity a 
profound and thorough thing. It insists 
on teaching principles and truths, and is 
not satisfied with just imposing forms. 



We look back over history, and we 
see the same sight always. Wherever any 
age has given its successor nothing but 
forms and institutions ready-made, the 
new age has not merely made no ad- 



JEfcucation* 3 

vance upon the old ; it has invariably 
shrunk and shriveled till it lived a life 
too small even to fill the narrow limits 
which its father claimed. But wherever 
any age has given its child an education 
in any vital truths, the child has always 
taken those truths, developed them into 
an effectiveness and built them into a 
beauty that the father never guessed. 



THE Jew was so used to the sublime 
thought of human life held fast in the 
hands of the Divine authority, shaped 
into gradual rectitude by the continual 
pressure of command and prohibition ; 
the decalogue so supremely represented 
to him the first thought of religion, that 
his prayer for a new generation's relig- 
ious life touched of necessity first of all 



4 ITnspiration anfc Grutb* 

upon the moral side, the keeping of the 
commandments of the Lord. And here, 
I take it, the Jew simply conceives the 
course of all successful culture. 



¥ 



The order of the Testaments is not an 
accidental, but an essential order. Cal- 
vary, in its idea, in its divine conception 
was "from the foundation," long before 
Sinai ; but in man's apprehension of 
them, Sinai antedated Calvary by fifteen 
hundred years. The conscience must 
bow itself to the supreme " Thou shalt " 
and "Thou shalt not" of authority, be- 
fore grace can enter in to win the heart 
with the gentle persuasiveness of its 
"Believe and live." John the Baptist 
must preach repentance before Christ 
can proclaim regeneration. 



Education. 5 

God wastes no history. In every age 
and every land He is working for the 
elucidation of some moral truth, some 
riper culture for the character of man. 



Zbe State* 




GOVERNMENT is an incor- 
porated, an embodied truth. 
Get any high idea about it, 
get beyond the thought that 
a nation is just a multitude of men 
who have happened to come together 
in a certain country, and who have 
bargained among themselves not to 
hurt each other, not to rob and kill 
each other, and you must come to 
this, that every nation is a divine utter- 
ance before the world of certain prin- 
ciples, of providence, of brotherhood, 
of justice, of the divine and human lives. 
The highest conception of the state, as 
of the world, is that it is an uttered 
thought of God, a certain colossal utter- 
ance of truth. 

(7) 



8 Inspiration anD ftrutb* 

The healthy state, like the healthy 
human body, can tolerate nothing within 
it that will not become part and parcel 
of itself, ready to share its fortunes, 
ready to do its work. A scholarship 
which tries to live in the state and yet 
not be of it, setting itself apart, fastidious, 
critical, captious, however thorough or 
elegant it may be, is mischievous. The 
politician who lives the life to which all 
politicians tend, of isolation from the 
common public interests, thinking that 
the state and government are things for 
him to use, and not that he is their 
instrument ; that they exist for him, not 
he for them, — he is a terrible curse 
always. May God rid us of him speed- 
ily. 



¥ 



A GREAT public life moving healthily 



£be State* 9 

will warn us of any coming dangers, as 
the ocean itself rings the storm-bell that 
tells of its own tumults. 



The time has . . . passed when a Sun- 
day-school book need count it unworthy 
of its pages to help some boy in the city 
or on the prairies to gather up, with the 
love of the Lord who is to save him, a 
love of the land he may be called to die 
for, and of all the great race to which, 
if he lives at all worthily, his life is to be 
given. 



¥ 



I PLEAD with you for all that makes 
strong citizens. First, clear convictions, 
deep, careful, patient study of the gov- 
ernment under which we live, until you 
not merely believe it is the best in all 



io 1Fn6pf ration and £rutb* 

the world, but know why you believe. 
And then a clear conscience, as clear in 
private interests, as much ashamed of 
public as of private sin, as ready to hate 
and rebuke and vote down corruption in 
the state, in your own party, as you 
would be in your own store or church ; 
as ready to bring the one as the other 
to the judgment of a living God. And 
then unselfishness : an earnest and ex-' 
alted sense that you are for the land, 
and not alone the land for you ; some- 
thing of the self-sacrifice which they 
showed who died for us from '6i to '65. 
And then activity : the readiness to wake 
and watch and do a citizen's work un- 
tiringly, counting it as base not to vote 
at an election, not to work against a bad 
official, or to work for a good one, as it 
would have been to shirk a battle in the 
war. Such strong citizenship let there 



Cbe State. 1 1 

be among us ; such knightly doing of 
our duties on the field of peace. 



i 



A STATE is not merely an idea, or an 
accident, or a machine, but is a being 
with the privilege of force. 



¥ 



SOMEWHERE, sometimes, it will assert 
itself strongly in the action of the world. 
Busied mostly within itself, in its own 
self-regulation, in the development of 
its own resources, and in the extension 
of its influence through the peaceful 
machineries of commerce and negotia- 
tion, there must be in it a power to 
enforce itself at the call of justice upon 
the unwilling action either of its own 



i2 Inspiration anfc Grutb* 

subjects who separate themselves in re- 
bellion from it, or against other nations 
who wantonly set themselves in the way 
of its just growth. 



Since truth lives in outward struc- 
tures, and embodies itself in govern- 
ments, it has not merely its spiritual 
relations to wills, but its physical rela- 
tions to actions. It is hindered not only 
by unconverted hearts, but by armed 
rebellions. And so it has a right and 
need to say not merely to the will 
" Believe," but to the action " Submit." 
It has not merely its higher functions of 
persuasion, but its lower functions, too, 
ol force. 



Mar. 




H, how alike all history seems ! 
How old, and yet eternally 
how new, these elementary 
emotions are ! How the 
first instincts that make men fight for 
freedom, and good government, and 
truth, last on from age to age ! old and 
yet ever young, like the eternal skies, 
the ever self-renewing trees, the gray 
and child-like sea ! 



DISPERSING armies and hanging trai- 
tors, imperatively as justice and necessity 
may demand them both, are not the kill- 
ing of the spirit out of which they 
sprang. 

(13) 



H inspiration anfc XTrutb* 

It is not the least of the debts that 
we owe to our Union soldiers that their 
very graves are vocal — that though dead 
they speak to us still. 



THE men who from the bloody shore 
of the Rebellion embarked into the other 
life have left their foot-prints inefface- 
able upon the margin where they planted 
them, and made it recognizable and dear 
forever. 



It is because in them, in what they 
were and what they did, the best of our 
national character shone out, that these 
soldiers have won a dearness and a per- 



War, 15 

manent memory that do not belong 
merely to their personality. The nation 
honors in them its truest representatives. 
The real life of the land sees in them the 
ideal life which is the true outcome of its 
institutions. They were the flower of its 
principles, and so it sprinkles its memo- 
rial flowers on their graves. 



It was a noble gift of Providence that 
in one man [Washington] should be 
comprised and pictured, for the dullest 
eyes to see, the majesty and meaning of 
the struggle that gave our nation birth. 



Oh, the mysterious power of a death 
for a noble cause ! The life is truly 
given. It passes out of the dying body 
into the cause, which lives anew. 



1 6 Inspiration anD Grutb* 

WHEN the great ship had hardly 
rounded into port; while, standing on 
the shore of peace, we felt the solid earth 
still rocking under our feet with the re- 
membered heaving of the sea, they who 
had watched and labored for her safety 
through the nights and storms out on 
mid-ocean, one by one, as if their work 
was done, began to pass to their reward, 
and to what other tasks we cannot know, 
awaiting them in other worlds. What 
have they left behind them, they and the 
humbler dead whom votive monuments 
and tender hearts remember still in every 
town and hamlet of their land? Not 
only what they did, not only even what 
they were, but new tasks like their own 
for us who stay behind them. They did 
not merely clear the field of treason. 
By the same labor they built up a new 
possibility of national character and life. 



War* 17 

They were like the men who, in these 
stony pastures of Andover, clear the 
rough field of stones and build the gray 
wall that is to surround and shelter it, 
out of the same material, at the same 

time By purer social life, by finer 

aspirations, by more unselfishness, by 
heartier hatred of corruption, let us be 
worthy of them, and in our quiet duties 
build the true memorial to the characters 
of those who found their duty in the 
camp, the prison and the field, and where 
they found it did it even to the death. 
They saw that their country was like a 
precious vase of rarest porcelain, price- 
less while it was whole, valueless if it 
was broken into fragments. What they 
died to keep whole, may we in our seve- 
ral places live to keep holy ! So may 
we be worthy of them. 



1 8 ITnspiration anD XLxutb. 

As the merchant, the scholar, the 
statesman, the diplomatist represent the 
other elements of power in the state, by 
which she impresses her will upon other 
wills ; so the soldier represents the ele- 
ment of force by which she must be 
ready to rule action without ruling will 
when the clear need shall come. 



¥ 



A MERCIFUL Providence kept our first 
history from becoming a military history. 
And if we ask how Providence did this 
good work for us, the answer can be only 
in the way in which God made the 
thought and the devotion of the time so 
strong that force was always kept in its 
true place, — their servant. 



War, 19 

His [the Puritan soldier's] was the 
great, homely, intelligible utterance of 
strength, ringing out clear and sharp in 
the midst of the often thin and over- 
subtle theologizings of the time, as the 
dazzling and bewildered atmosphere 
compresses and discharges its electri- 
city in the piercing lightning and the 
pealing thunder. 



When we look at Washington, we are 
at once struck by seeing how in him, 
who represented as a military man the 
force of the new ideas which were at 
work, we have also as a thinker, as a 
statesman and political philosopher, the 
clearest example of the reason of which 
that force was the expression. Often 
the two are disunited. One man does 
the thinking, another man does the fight- 



20 Inspiration anD ZTrutb* 

ing. One man develops the idea in the 
closet, and another makes it forcible 
upon the field. Rarely have the two so 
met in one man. Washington was at 
once the clearest thinker and the most 
effective soldier of our Revolutionary 
struggle. 



NEVER was there a fighting-man with 
less of the purely military passion. He 
was the armed citizen, armed for a cause 
that belonged to the very essence of his 
citizenship. When that cause had tri- 
umphed on the field of battle, he laid 
down his arms and was the unarmed 
citizen, — the citizen, the same man still 
contending for precisely the same cause 
on the field of statesmanlike debate for 
which he had fought at Trenton and 
suffered at Valley Forge. 



max. 21 

TRUTH in her armor is apt to be a 
very clumsy giant. Men will forget or 
deny what must be our belief all through, 
that the divine mission of force implies 
that force has no mission save for divine 
tasks, none for the mere brutalities of 
selfishness, or ambition, or jealousy, or 
worldly rage ; none for the mere punc- 
tilios of national dignity. 



% 



FORCE has no right here in the world 
except as it is simply truth in armor. 



THE presence of the distinct military 
element, the ruler of, or the slave of, but 
not a part of the nation, not bound up 
in the nation's fortune, nor sharing the 
nation's feeling, not springing from the 



22 Inspiration anfc Grutb* 

nation's heart, this is what has made the 
weakness, and at last brought the death 
of many a noble nation, both of the old 
and of the modern times. May God 
save us from it forever. 



« 



It is not necessary to excuse all our 
people's early or later treatment of the 
Indian. From earliest to latest — from 
the Pilgrim times down to the Indian 
policies of these last days — there is too 
much that never can be excused. 



¥ 



We are suffering to-day [June 5, 1864], 
whatever be the secondary causes, for 
the violation of two of God's great moral 
laws, the law of the sacredness of govern- 
ment and the law of the brotherhood of 



TKflar* 2 3 

man. Gradually, grandly, from between 
these fearful wheels that drip with blood, 
are being ground forth into shapes which 
men's eyes, quick-sighted with anxiety, 
must see, these two eternal ordinances 
of God, that government has a divine 
right to be honored, and that man has a 
divine right to be free. Those two 
truths, burned into the very fibre of our 
people as they walk the fire, are to be 
the great moral acquisition of American 
character. 



Is there one of us that can look about 
him and think without a shudder of an- 
other generation of our people working 
out this same education that we are go- 
ing through? What! all these fearful 
years again? Again these battles that 
the eye cannot count or the heart re- 



24 Inspiration anfc Grutb* 

member? Again this waste of precious 
blood, this bitter hatred, these wild 
blazings-up of the devilish in man, this 
land with State on State where the har- 
vests find no room to grow for the 
crowded graves? Must it all come 
again, this dark Egyptian Passover- 
night of history, wherein God leads the 
bondmen out, and, in all the stricken 
land that held them slaves, leaves in 
their deliverance " not a house where 
there is not one dead"? We have no 
right to leave a chance behind us that 
this work will have to be done again. 
But it must be, unless we can bring out 
of it all, clearly and definitely and forever 
settled, and lay down before the next age 
of Americans, the truths of national au- 
thority and human liberty, to be the 
materials out of which it is to build the 
future. 



TOar, 25 

A TRUTH starts on its way across the 
world, sent by God to possess the world ; 
and that truth meets its obstacles, — ob- 
stinate and resisting men. It lays itself 
against the wills of those men. By 
every method of approach, through the 
affections and the conscience and the 
sense of beauty, and in every other way, 
it tries to get power over those wills and 
make them yield to it. It tries to rule the 
will and so to reach the actions which 
will be spontaneously obedient when the 
will has once submitted. It largely suc- 
ceeds. That is the success it most de- 
sires. But when its efforts of persuasion 
and conviction have failed to remove any 
one obstinate enemy out of its path, 
what then? Surely, unless physical 
force be of a wholly immoral nature, we 
must believe that God has so arranged 
his universe that this beleaguered and 



26 ITnepiratton anfc ftrutb* 

hindered truth may claim the powers 
that can compel the action even when 
they cannot turn the will, and force out 
of its way an enemy who will not turn 
into a friend. 






Zbc Cburcb* 




O ! it dawns upon you that the 
Church is not to be made, 
that the Church is here al- 
ready. In the aggregate of 
all this Christly life you have the 
Church of Christ, just as truly as in 
the aggregate of human existence you 
have humanity. One has no more 
to be made than the other. Both exist 
in their components. 



The Romish idea is that the Church 
thinks and struggles and receives help 
and revelation. The Protestant idea is 
that thought and struggle and help and 
light come to the Man. 
(27) 



28 Inspiration anfc Grutb* 

The living souls must go before the 
living Church, which has no life except in 
them. . . . Churches live in their souls. 
O, the old struggles, so endless and so 
fruitless, that history has to show, of men 
and times that tried to keep a Church 
alive without caring for the life of souls ; 
men and times which seem to have 
strangely fancied that there was a certain 
power of vitality in the very Church it- 
self, so that every soul on earth might 
cease to receive inflow of Christ and yet 
somehow the Church live on ! It is the 
danger of the ecclesiastical spirit. It is 
the danger for all Churchmen and all 
Church times to fear. 



The Church, whose purpose in being 
is merely to feed her children's life and 



XLbe Cburcb* 2 9 

so increase her own, may harm the very- 
life that she was meant to cultivate. 
This is nothing strange. Nothing is so 
likely to stop a stream of water as 
the broken or displaced fragments of 
the very earthen pipe through which it 
was meant to flow. 



If a Church, in any way, by hindering 
the free play of human thoughtfulness 
upon religious things, by clothing with 
mysterious reverence, and so shutting 
out from the region of thought and study, 
acts and truths which can be thoroughly 
used only as they are growingly under- 
stood, by limiting within hard and mi- 
nute and invariable doctrinal statements 
the variety of the relations of the human 
experience to God, if, in any such way, 



3° Inspiration anfc Grutb* 

a Church hinders at all the free inflow of 
every new light which God is waiting to 
give to the souls of men as fast as they 
are ready to receive it, just so far she 
blinds and wrongs her children's intelli- 
gence and weakens her own vitality. 
This is the suicide of Dogmatism. 



If, again, a Church, in any way, sets 
any technical command of hers to stand 
so across the path, that a command of 
God cannot get free access to the will of 
any of the least of all God's people ; if 
there be, as there has been again and 
again, a system of ecclesiastical morality 
different from the eternal morality which 
lies above the Church, between the soul 
and God, a morality which hides some 
eternal duties and winks at some eternal 



ftbe Cbutcb* 3 1 

sins, just so far as there is any such ob- 
liquity turning aside the straight, bright 
ray that is darting right from the throne 
of the God-soul to the will of the Man- 
soul, just so far the Church maims and 
wrongs her children's consciences, and 
weakens her own vitality. This is the 
suicide of Corruption. 



AGAIN, if the symbols of the Church, 
which ought to convey God's love to 
man, become so hard that the love does 
not find its way through them, and they 
stand as splendid screens between the 
Soul and the Love, or have such a pos- 
itive character of their own, so far forget 
their simple duty of pure transparency 
and mere transmission, that they send 
the Love down to the Soul colored with 



3 2 Ifnsptration anfc Grutb* 

themselves, formalized and artificial; if 
the Church dares either to limit into 
certain material channels, or to bind to 
certain forms of expression, that love of 
God which is as spiritual and as free as 
God, then yet again she is false to her 
duty, she binds and wrongs her children's 
loving hearts, and once again she weak- 
ens her own vitality. This is the suicide 
of Formalism. 



The time must come when Religion 
shall no longer make artificial virtues 
and vices of her own, and when with more 
unsparing tongue she shall detect and 
praise or denounce those virtues and 
vices which are essential and eternally 
the same. Then a thousand rills of life 
will be open into her which are closed 
to-day, and she will live a thousand-fold. 



XTbe Cburcb* 33 

Of the essential life of the Church, of 
the truly living Church, what can we say 
but this, that it is that which most com- 
pletely feels that it was made for men, 
not men for it ; which, therefore, lives 
only as it lives in them ; which strives for 
nothing but to open more and more the 
channels of life from Christ to them? 
In such a church and such a church 
alone can be real unity. To be full of 
such a care for, and spirit of servantship 
to, the human soul, is the only power 
that can keep our own Church one in 
the midst of all her distractions. No 
outer bond of history or government can 
permanently hold her. Only this com- 
mon purpose, freely working in the 
Church at large, can keep the true or- 
ganic unity of life, which is the only 
unity worth having. The live pome- 
granate holds itself together with no 



34 inspiration anD Grutb* 

string tied round it. The dead pome- 
granate cracks and breaks. No tight- 
est string can hold it. The Living 
Church of truth, obedience, and spiritual 
love, will guard its own integrity. The 
disintegration of error, corruption or 
formalism, what compactest system can 
withstand ! 

THE Church does not become the 
world's savior by furnishing it with a 
powerful police. 



¥ 



The true relations between moral law 
and religious life are certainly not so 
difficult as men have made them. Moral 
action is, in one sense, the end ; that is, 
it is the necessary result of religion, not 
its final purpose. In another sense, 
moral law is the means by which the 



Gbe Cburcb, 35 

religious impulse steadies and supports 
itself, and mounts to higher spiritual 
heights. In this last sense, it is the very 
highest order of machinery, but it is 
machinery still. So that even if the 
Church were, what she has tried to be 
often, and has sometimes been to some 
extent, the great Reformer, breaking 
down sins, turning wrongs into rights, 
ruling men's actions everywhere ; glori- 
ous as such a sight would be, it would 
not be the Church communicating life. 
She would be purifying and cultivating 
her own life. She would be making the 
world ready for the life she had to give 
it, but not giving it yet. 



Wonderfully adapted to be the 
channel of the highest devotion, the 



3 6 Inspiration an& £rutb* 

deepest utterance of faith, submission 
and repentance, the very perfect ma- 
chinery of Christian living, the Church 
system is dead without some power of 
Christian life. 



So again of every sacred rite which, 
through the senses, opens a way for 
power to reach the heart. It is ma- 
chinery still. The sensuous impression 
may make the soul receptive, no doubt 
it does, to some of the more external 
messages of God. But the impression 
itself is not soul-life. It is not a new 
birth, though its frightened or ecstatic 
shiver is easily enough mistaken for an- 
other Genesis. 



Gbe Cburcb* 37 

WHO of us has not seen, nay, who of 
us in the deader moments of his parish 
life has not done, Church work enough 
— Sunday-schools, Bible-classes, night- 
schools, parish visiting, mothers' meet- 
ings and reading-rooms and all that — 
which he knew was only the mechanical 
whirling of the spindles by hand, with 
the vital fires utterly gone out in the 
furnaces below. 



What shall we say of Preaching? 
Only that if men can preach, and preach 
the very truth of Christ, year after year, 
and yet souls, thirsty for the water of life, 
sit at the dry mouths of their well-built 
channels and thirst in vain for help and 
salvation, then it must be that the mere 
telling the Truth as the mind can under- 



3 8 Inspiration anD Grutb* 

stand it and the lips can speak it, is not 
necessarily the communication of the 
Gospel Life. 



The Church . . . needs more of the 
Lord ; more knowledge, more obedience, 
more love of Jesus Christ. Unless we 
get that, and make that bear upon men's 
hearts and souls, we may chant our own 
sweetest praises in their ears, and our 
appeal for sympathy will be only very 
piteous. It will sound to the world as 
the plaintive cries of the Church do 
sound to many men under their windows, 
like the beggars violin, which neither 
claims tribute by the right of a gov- 
ernor, nor wins acknowledgment by the 
skill of an artist, but only extorts charity 
by the forlornness of the mendicant. 



Zhc Gburcb* 39 

If behind muscles, and blood, and 
brain, you know that there is a vital 
force, which utters itself through them, 
but which is another thing than they, 
which would live even if they were dead, 
then it is not strange to say that behind 
all morality, and order, and rites, and 
work, and preaching, there is a vital 
power of the Church, which utters itself 
through them, but which is another thing 
than they, without which they were dead, 
but which might live though every one 
of them should die. That life-power is 
Christ always entering into the Church, 
as truth, and guidance, and love ; and 
always passing out from the Church into 
humanity by the otherwise dead func- 
tions, vitalized by Him, of teaching and 
government, and active work. 



4° ITnspiration anfc ftrutb* 

Ac in the world of science men fear 
materialism which would crowd spirit 
and vital force out of the universe, and 
make all life exist and spread itself in 
the mechanical arrangement and re- 
arrangement of material atoms ; so there 
is always fear, and never more fear than 
now, of an ecclesiastical materialism, 
which shall make little of spiritual force, 
and try by the mechanical arrangement 
and re-arrangement of ecclesiastical 
atoms, of dioceses, and conventions, 
and canons, and rubrics, and the like, 
to make the dead world live the life of 
God. Such a materialism turns ma- 
chineries from being the homes into 
being the tombs of force, and makes us 
dread each step we see it take in ad- 
vance. 



Gbe Cbutcb* 4 1 

If ever our Church goes back, and 
cumbers herself with the precedents, and 
submits herself to the influence or author- 
ity, of the English Church, her power in 
this land is gone. She must be part and 
parcel of this people. She must be in 
heart and soul American, or she is noth- 
ing. She must have her sympathies 
here, and not across the sea. She must 
have her gaze and enthusiasm fixed upon 
the future of America, and not upon the 
past of England. 



We can conceive of a parish going on, 
the same parish still, though thought 
shall change and all religious speculation 
flow in new channels. But if men's souls 
cease to repent, and trust, and live by 
the divine communion, all is gone ; the 



4 2 ITnapiration anD ftrutb* 

Church is dead ; the spiritual building 
crumbles in decay. 

I KNOW that you will more than ac- 
cept under the great, glowing, all-em- 
bracing hospitality of this bounteous 
roof [that of Trinity Church, Boston], 
you will enthusiastically assert, that such 
a Church as this has no right to exist, or 
to think that it exists, for any limited 
company who own its pews. It would 
not be a Christian parish if it harbored 
such a thought. No, let the world come 
in. Let all men hear, if they will, the 
truths we love. Let no soul go unsaved 
through any selfishness of ours. 



THIS is the modern notion of a Church, 
- not luxury, but work. 



Cbe Cburcb* 43 

ANY man or any institution which 
attempts a great religious work in behalf 
of the growing generations of a country, 
must undertake, as preparatory to it, and 
as a necessary part of it, a great moral 
work as well. A faithful ministry, we 
hold, must not merely declare the Savior, 
but must attack and beat down those 
special sins which stand in the very door- 
ways and keep the Savior out of the 
hearts of men. 



THERE are cases in which the move- 
ment of the will is everything ; where to 
move action without moving will is to 
fail entirely. In such cases there can be 
no room for force. This is why our 
Lord, founding a religion whose whole 
life was to be in converted wills, found 



44 Inspiration anfc ftrutb* 

no place in its establishment or propaga- 
tion for the sword. 



The Church has been spread by force, 
but Christianity never. To try to think 
of extending a faith by force, is to try 
to think a contradiction. It is like 
thinking of raising enthusiasm with levers, 
or crushing genius with sledge-hammers. 
The tools have no relation to the mate- 
rial or the task. 



I LOOK round on the work to do, and 
I do not believe that either Episcopalian- 
ism or Methodism or Presbyterianism 
or Baptism is going to assert the victory 
of Christianity over sin, the opening of 
the barred citadel of wickedness in this our 



Gbe Cburcb* 45 

land. The Church of Christ, simple, un- 
impeded, armed powerfully because 
armed lightly, the essential Church of 
Christ must make the first entrance. 
Then let us have up our methods of de- 
nominational government, and each, in 
the way that he thinks most divine, strive 
for the perfected dominion of our one 
great Lord. 



Just as in God's great sea there is a 
tide-power and a wave-power, and both 
are the outputtings of the one same 
force; just as neither denies the other, 
each lends the other impulse ; and the 
quick waves, which fall like lashes, and 
the slow, heaving, laboring tide, have 
both their work to do in the eternal bat- 
tle of the sea upon the land : so it is not 
inconceivable that in the Christian world 



4 6 ITttsptration and Grutb* 

there may be a church-force and a de- 
nomination-force, which yet are both the 
expression of one same purpose and de- 
sign of Deity. 

The waves that crest themselves with 
angry foam, and beat and beat and beat 
from sunrise round to sunrise endlessly 
upon the stubborn beach, are the most 
visible agents of the work that is done. 
But who will find anything but thankful- 
ness, if once in every world-day the great 
hand of the Maker and the Watcher is 
put down under the great mass of the 
sea itself, and the deep tide of Christian 
law and Christian truth, with all the 
waves running their eager races on its 
bosom, is driven, mightily, silently, far- 
ther up than any wave had reached upon 
the conquered shore? Who will com- 



TLbe Gburcb* 47 

plain if Christian union, for certain pur- 
poses, in certain efforts, develops a new 
sort of power that the narrower individu- 
ality of denominational life has not at- 
tained ? 



THE everlasting principle remains, that 
no moral authority or doctrinal correct- 
ness or spiritual impulse can last from 
generation to generation unimpaired, un- 
less it incorporates itself in some recog- 
nized manifestation, and yields to the 
crystallization which its essential life de^ 
mands. 




Scepticism* 

BHE countless assaults of a 
speculative time, testing 
every approach, bringing 
the manifold artillery of 
modern knowledge to bear, calling 
both Ihe frivolity and the earnestness 
of our strange age to its aid, enlisting 
an internal treason as well as an exter- 
nal enmity — no wonder that they 
make the boldest fear sometimes. The 
rain is descending, the floods are coming, 
the winds are blowing and beating, and 
when loose houses are sliding off the 
slippery sand on every side of them, no 
wonder that the dwellers in the house 

(49) 



5° 1Ttt0ptration anD Grutb* 

upon the rocjc, with dazzled eyes, think 
sometimes that they see their own foun- 
dation waver. And yet the case does 
not seem hard to understand. 



Christianity is one and everlasting. 
Its work of salvation for plan's soul is 
the same blessed work forever. But its 
relation to the world's life at large must 
be forever changing w r ith the changes 
of that world's needs and seekings. 
The larger applications of Christianity 
must of necessity be from time to time 
readjusted, and in their readjustments its 
power may be temporarily obscured or 
unrecognized as it passes into new forms 
of exhibition. Is it strange, then, in a 
day of readjustments such as ours, when 
so many forms are going to pieces, so 



Scepticism* 5 1 

many old relations broken up and 
changed for new ones, when so many of 
the accidents of Christianity are being- 
taken down, that men should be ready 
enough to think that Christianity itself 
is worn out and obsolete? 



We feel no doubt of the eternal issue. 
Our faith in Christ comes not from 
seeing how men treat Him, but from 
reading what God says of Him and feel- 
ing how He works. We are sure of the 
end ; that all this overturning, overturn- 
ing, overturning, must bring at last the 
day of Him whose right it is. 



Meanwhile, what can we do but 
keep alive by earnest and continual 



5 2 Inspiration anD arutb* 

utterance those truths which we believe, 
no matter how utterly men may disown 
their names, are doing the work of the 
world all the while ? This is one of the 
great values of such a time, that it sifts 
and ordinates truths, and makes us find 
out which are the few precious ones 
that we will not let go at any risk. 



And when we look about and ask, 
How can we best preserve these truths ? 
I think there can be but one answer. 
The highest truth has always found its 
own best guardians. Christ Himself 
pointed to the younger generation that 
was growing up about Him, and declared 
its hands to be the place where His gos- 
pel would be safest, purest and most 
fruitful. Other years have their work to 



Scepticism* 53 

do — old age, and middle manhood, and 
the fresh enterprise of originating youth. 
But, after all, these are not the surest 
guardians of truth. 



THROUGH the life of every people 
winds an endless procession, which ap- 
pears to totter with its feebleness, which 
again and again is lost out of sight 
among the hurrying crowd that seems to 
tread it under foot, and yet whose tiny 
hands bear safest and most pure forever 
the sacred treasures of all time. And 
if you once get a truth into the circle of 
that endless childhood, it makes its way 
to unfound hearts, and, through the 
crazy passions and cold bigotries of life, 
wins for itself an influence which men 
feel because they do not fear. 



54 Inspiration anfc XLxutb. 

It was not far from the time when 
this Church [Trinity Church, Boston] 
was founded, that Bishop Butler wrote 
in England words which seem strange, 
I think, to us as we read them now. 
He said, " It has come to be taken for 
granted, by many persons, that Christi- 
anity is not so much a matter of inquiry, 
but that it is now at length discovered 
to be fictitious. " And, after all that, see 
what life came out of what men called 
dead. A great many people are saying 
now what people used to say in Bishop 
Butler's day, but it is no truer now than 
it was then. 




Xife. 

1HERE are two souls in the 
world, the soul of God and 
the soul of man ; no other. 
.... The God-soul is the 
centre of all things. The souls of men 
stand around and gather all their culture 
and their growth from it. 



No enumeration of qualities or facul- 
ties of matter accounts to us for physical 
vitality ; and no description of man taught 
and ruled and loved by God, makes clear 
to us that life of God imparted to man 
which we call holiness. Only this we 
are sure of, that all Spiritual Life, whether 

(55) 



5 6 ITnsptration anD XLxutb. 

in these its elements, or in this subtle 
force which blends the elements into a 
true vitality, is an inflow from the soul of 
God into the soul of Man. 



Life can only be truly communicated 
by truly living methods. Nothing else 
will do. This takes all power away from 
mere machineries from the highest to the 
lowest. 



THAT is what we want, — strong, deep 
convictions which are unshakable, and 
then a glad and constant expectation of 
new and richer light from God forever ; 
a perfect assurance of the safety of the 
ship in which we sail, and then a perfect 
willingness to sail into whatever new seas 



%ife. 57 

God may open to us ; an absolute cer- 
tainty of the sufficiency of Christ, and 
then a passionate desire that no Christ 
of our own fancy may satisfy us, that He 
may show Himself to us more and more 
completely as He really is ; the rock un- 
der our feet and the limitless air over our 
heads. 



THROUGH our fathers' wisdom and 
devotion, we must become wiser and 
more devoted than they. Friends, we 
must rise to thoughts beyond our fathers, 
or we are not our fathers' worthy chil- 
dren. Not to do in our days just what 
our fathers did long ago, but to live as 
truly up to our light as our fathers lived 
up to theirs, — that is what it is to be 
worthy of our fathers. 



5 8 Inspiration anfc ftrutb* 

THOSE be our prayers: — More 
strength ; more light. More constancy ; 
more progress. 



The man of the nineteenth century 
thinks very differently -from the man of 
the eighteenth, but the love with which 
he worships God, is the same love. The 
Evangelical has different dogmas from 
the old Georgian Churchman, but they 
bow before the same mercy-seat, and 
resist the same temptations by the same 
grace. 



A MAN is always more precious than 
his work. 



Everywhere, always, good culture 



%ite. 59 

and the championship of principles be- 
long together. 

i 

That men should be true to their best 
convictions, and to their simple duty, 
this is the blessing that gives all bless- 
ings with it, and is the fountain of all 
charity and progress. 



It is Truth that we want in every de- 
partment of our life. In State and 
Church we need it, at home and on the 
street; in the smallest fashions and in 
the most sacred mysteries ; that men 
should say what they think, should act 
out what they believe, should be them- 
selves continually without concealment 
and without pretense. When we have 



60 Inspiration anD XTrutb* 

that, then we shall have at least a solid 
basis of reality on which to build all 
future progress. It is the benefit of 
great and solemn crises that they give us 
some characters which manifest this sim- 
ple Truth, that they make it to some ex- 
tent the character of all the time. 



ONE period collects materials, the 
next period builds the palace. The long, 
hard-working winter gathers with infinite 
toil the conditions of growth, stores them 
about the dead unanswering seed, then 
dies like David, and the spring-time, its 
successor, bright as Solomon in all his 
glory, comes and finds the preparation 
made, and, in the sunshine, builds the 
temple-plant. 



Xife, 6 1 

You have seen fathers, not cultivated 
or educated men, who just accepted it 
as their task to gather the materials of a 
cultivated and educated life for their 
children. Not for them to build the 
gracious beauty or the massive strength 
of scholarly attainment ; but they were 
content to get everything ready, and 
then lay the work of construction into 
their children's hands, in whose fulfil- 
ment of their wise ambitions they them- 
selves should live again. And so it is in 
human history. Age gathers materials 
for age. One century with slow and 
painful labor beats out a few crude ideas, 
which lie like David's logs of wood and 
blocks of stone and seem merely to 
cumber the ground. A new century 
comes, and, inheriting the unfinished 
plan, it takes these crude ideas, and, lo, 
they are just what it needs. It finds 



62 Inspiration anD ftrutb* 

Ihem hewn to fit each other, and out of 
them it builds the compact and graceful 
beauty of its institutions. 



TRUTHS are the roots of duties. A 
rootless duty, one that has no truth below 
it out of which it grows, has no life, and 
will have no growth. 



Men talk about morality as one thing, 
and religion as another. Sometimes 
they pit them one against the other, 
as if there were some sort of natural an- 
tagonism between the two. We take a 
higher ground, insisting that there can 
be no such thing as morality without 
religion, and that morality becomes more 



and more genuine just in proportion 
as religion becomes more and more 
sound and true. We do not believe 
in any reform which finds its whole 
motive within the region of human 
relations. We look for the permanent 
success of no effort, however noble its 
appointed aim may be, which does not 
draw its impulse from some association 
of humanity with a power and a will 
above its own. 



WITHOUT settling detailed judgments, 
which it is not our place to do, we feel 
sure, in general, that God has bound our 
whole nature into such a perfect unity 
that no man can hold wrong opinions 
without incurring, just so far, danger of 
injury to his moral life. 



6 4 ITnepiration anfc Grutb, 

Once accept this supreme importance 
of truth, and every part of our nature 
becomes anxious for the preservation of 
the testimonies of God. The great doc- 
trines of our faith become the great pil- 
lars of our life. 



All union between such complicated 
individualities as men involves surrender, 
the temporary stripping off of non-essen- 
tials that the essential may go on and do 
its work unhindered. Afterward, in the 
later stages of its labor, each portion of 
the union may resume its non-essentials, 
which are not therefore non-importants. 

It is the great boon of such characters 
as Mr. Lincoln's, that they reunite what 



God has joined together and man has 
put asunder. In him was vindicated the 
greatness of real goodness and the good- 
ness of real greatness. The twain were 
one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes 
who stood and looked up to him for 
direction with such a loving and implicit 
trust can tell you to-day whether the wise 
judgments that he gave came most from 
a strong head or a sound heart. If you 
ask them they are puzzled. There are 
men as good as he, but they do bad 
things. There are men as intelligent as 
he, but they do foolish things. In him 
goodness and intelligence combined and 
made their best result of wisdom. 



THE simple natures and forces will 
always be the most pliant ones. Water 



66 ITnspiratton anfc Grutb* 

bends and shapes itself to any new chan- 
nel. Air folds and adapts itself to each 
new figure. They are the simplest and 
the most infinitely active things in nature. 
So this nature, in very virtue of its sim- 
plicity, must be also free, always fitting 
itself to each new need. It will always 
start from the most fundamental and 
eternal conditions, and work in the 
straightest even although they be the 
newest ways to the present prescribed 
purpose. In one word it must be broad 
and independent and radical. 



Perfect truth consists not merely in 
the right constituents of character, but 
in their right and intimate conjunction. 
This union of the mental and moral into 



Xtfe. 6 7 

a life of admirable simplicity is what we 
most admire in children, but in them it 
is unsettled and unpractical. But when 
it is preserved into a manhood, deepened 
into reliability and maturity, it is that 
glorified childlikeness, that high and 
reverend simplicity which shames and 
baffles the most accomplished astuteness, 
and is chosen by God to fill his purposes 
when he needs a ruler for his people of 
faithful and true heart. 



It is inevitable, till man be far more 
unfeeling and untrue to his convictions 
than he has always been, that a great 
wrong asserting itself vehemently should 
arouse to no less vehement assertion the 
opposing right. 



6$ ITnapiratton anD ftrutb* 

When shall we learn that with all true 
men it is not what they intend to do, but 
it is what the qualities of their natures 
bind them to do, that determines their 
career? 



With a reverent and clear mind to be 
controlled by events, means to be con- 
trolled by God. 



Truth and justice are in their very 
nature mighty and intolerant, and must 
fight with and conquer falsehood and sin 
in any region of this many-regioned uni- 
verse where they may meet. 



It is not possible until the need comes, 
I suppose, that we should feel how legit- 



imate and true an accompaniment of 
every perfect nature is Force ; that is, 
the ability to clear its field and do its 
work even by the violent destruction of 
the hinderances that block its way. 



SHALL we say that force, or compul- 
sion, is something that is so low that it 
can belong to the devil only? that God 
can have nothing to do with it, and so 
that great truths and causes, high prin- 
ciples, which are the angels of God, his 
Michaels, have no right to strive; that 
they must not fight with their dragons ? 
Very important it seems to me that we 
should understand the opposite. 



The more we see of events the less we 



7° Inspiration anfc Grutb* 

come to believe in any fate or destiny 
except the destiny of character. 



We make too little always of the phys- 
ical. . . . Who shall say that even with 
David the son of Jesse, there was not a 
physical as well as a spiritual culture in 
the struggle with the lion and the bear 
which occurred among the sheepfolds, 
out of which God took him to be the 
ruler of his people? 



There is a certain wide-spread nerv- 
ousness and fear of giving force any true 
place in the world. It seems a horrible 
intruder, soon, we pray, to be cast out. 
And yet force is as truly the companion 



Xife. 7 1 

of reason as body is of spirit. Righteous 
force is the reaction of truth upon oppos- 
ing matter. 



This great and gracious nature tempts 
me with all her alluring motherliness to 
bow my will to hers and use her only in 
obedience to her own laws. But if I re- 
fuse, she flings her tempest at me, or 
she sinks my ship, or scorches my un- 
shielded head with her fiery suns, or 
paralyzes me with disease, and compels 
me back into the obedience from which 
I foolishly and arrogantly tried to escape. 



Any baby may set his will against the 
will of Mother Nature, and refuse to 
listen to her reason ; but the most colos- 



7 2 Inspiration anfc Zxutb. 

sal giant must yield his actions to her 
requirements and submit to her majestic 
force. 



I CANNOT draw my picture of the per- 
fect and perfectly effective man or state, 
unless I lodge the tenderest sympathy 
and the wisest judgment in a strong, 
healthy body that shall compel respect 
and demand obedience when the higher 
powers fail. 



FROM his boyhood up he [Abraham 
Lincoln] lived in direct and vigorous 
contact with men and things, not as in 
older states and easier conditions with 
words and theories ; and both his moral 
convictions and his intellectual opinions 
gathered from that contact a supreme 



%ife. 73 

degree of that character by which men 
knew him — that character which is the 
most distinctive possession of the best 
American nature — that almost indescrib- 
able quality which we call in general 
clearness or truth, and which appears in 
the physical structure as health, in the 
moral constitution as honesty, in the 
mental structure as sagacity, and in the 
region of active life as practicalness. 



Everywhere this earnestness of de- 
sire that truth should work, should move, 
should go. And what then? Why, of 
necessity, that if in going it should meet 
perhaps some obstinate resistance which 
will not yield, then it must break down. 
The brute circumstance must not tyran- 
nize over and stop the progress of the 
spiritual essence. 



74 Inspiration anfc £rutb* 

In all the simplest characters the line 
between the mental and moral natures is 
always vague and indistinct. They run 
together, and in their best combinations 
you are unable to discriminate in the wis- 
dom which is their result, how much is 
moral and how much is intellectual. You 
are unable to tell whether in the wise 
acts and words which issue from such 
a life there is more of the righteousness 
that comes of a clear conscience or of 
the sagacity that comes of a clear brain. 
In more complex characters and under 
more complex conditions, the moral 
and the mental lives come to be less 
healthily combined. They co-operate, 
they help each other less. They come 
even to stand over against each other as 
antagonists ; till we have that vague but 
most melancholy notion which pervades 
the life of all elaborate civilization, that 



Xffe. 75 

goodness and greatness, as we call them, 
are not to be looked for together, till we 
expect to see and so do see a feeble and 
narrow conscientiousness on the one 
hand and a bad unprincipled intelligence 
on the other, dividing the suffrages of 
men. 



This truth comes to us more and 
more the longer that we live, that on 
what field or in what uniform, or with 
what aims we do our duty, matters very- 
little, or even what our duty is, great or 
small, splendid or obscure. Only to 
find our duty certainly and somewhere, 
somehow do it faithfully, makes us good, 
strong, happy, and useful men, and 
tunes our lives into some feeble echo of 
the life of God. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 064 285 7 



